The Forgotten Legion, by Ben Kane, read by Michael Praed (17½hrs unabridged, BBC, £24.50)In 53BC an army of 35,000 Roman legionaries led by Marcus Licinius Crassus, the richest man in Rome and a member of the first ruling triumvirate, was routed by 10,000 Parthian horse archers and cataphracts at the battle of Carrhae – the worst defeat in Roman history. Here's how Ben Kane, latest recruit to the sword-and-sandals school of historical novelists, describes the legionaries' first glimpse of the enemy. "On a flat plain in the middle distance sat the Parthian army, a formation nearly a mile across, their appearance distorted by the haze. Thousands of men on horseback waited patiently for the Romans. Huge, brightly coloured banners swirled in the hot air, making them appear even more alien. The noise of pounding drums and clanging bells reached the legions as signallers relayed messages. It was an immensely intimidating sight for the exhausted Roman soldiers. Sunburned faces went pale and oaths were spat. More than one mercenary looked west to the Euphrates and safety." Of the seven legions that set out across the Mesopotamian desert under Crassus, only one returned. The 10,000 soldiers taken prisoner were given the choice between crucifixion and conscription, hence the forgotten legion of the title, which was force-marched over the mountains to Margiana in modern Turkmenistan to guard Parthia's eastern frontier.

For someone who can't take gratuitous violence, I've become curiously addicted to the rituals and techniques of ancient battlecraft. Carrhae and its consequences play a relatively minor part in Kane's overall story. Our main concern is the fate of the four fictional characters, Etruscan Haruspex Tarquinius, Gallic gladiator Brennus and 13-year-old twins Fabiola and Romulus, born into slavery and sold to a high-class brothel and the Ludus Magnus gladiator school respectively. It's epic stuff full of the necessarily ingenious twists and turns of plot that eventually find our three male heroes heading for Margiana in the forgotten legion. Of course there's a sequel, this is book one of a chronicle guaranteed to hook devotees of Cornwell's Sharpe stories and Iggulden's Mongol Conquerors – me, for one.

Vespasian, by Robert Fabbri, read by Peter Kenny (10¾hrs unabridged, BBC, £23.50)Fast-forward 100 years and here is Vespasian, in AD69, turbulent Year of the Four Emperors, cutting his young legionary teeth in the Thracian wars. He became emperor after killing Vitellius, who killed Otho, who killed Galba, who succeeded Nero, who killed pretty much everyone, including himself. I suspect this is also a chronicle, since it ends with Vespasian still a mere tribune. Be warned: compared to these battle descriptions, Carrhae was a picnic.

Lives of the Twelve Caesars, by Suetonius, read by Derek Jacobi (7½hrs abridged, Naxos, £24.99)Legion lit notwithstanding, serious listeners less interested in testudo and buccinae will relish Derek Jacobi's saturnine reading of this classic series of imperial biographies. Suetonius was the first historian to mention Caesar's epilepsy and possibly the only one to report that Vespasian was once pelted with turnips by protesters in Judaea. We know that Shakespeare ransacked Plutarch's Roman Lives but did anyone point him to Suetonius's account of Nero's attemps to murder his mother, which might have given us another comedy? Having failed three times to poison her "he contrived machinery by which the floor over her bedchanber might be made to fall upon her while she was asleep in the night. This design failing also … he next constructed a ship so made that it would very suddenly cleave asunder, in the hope of destroying her either by drowning or by the deck above her cabin crushing her in its fall." No such luck. The ship sank, but his tough old mum swam to safety.